All Power To The People
My intentions isn’t to give a dialectical and historical context of the relationship between today’s “Gangs” (street formations) and past revolutionary movements, although there is an inextricable link between the two.
The origins of today’s street formations were strongly influenced by the original Black Panther Party and other similar organizations. They were formed to uplift and protect their communities from outside threats, threats that were typically imposed by law enforcement and the US government.
With destruction of the Black Panther Party, combined with the influx of drugs and firearms within their already oppressed communities, members of these formations were lured into “gang-bangin” against each other and a fratricidal and suicidal, criminal lifestyle that resulted in the abandonment of the ideals and principles that were brought forth and established by the formation’s founders. Ideals and principles that mirrored those of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army.
Today, there are a limited few who diligently impress upon their “homies” the importance of espousing the formations’ founding ideals and principles. Nevertheless, majority have been derailed from their initial revolutionary path, which has had a grave impact on the youth who romanticize today’s “gang” culture and their communities. Moreover, the absence of these ideals and principles has engendered a culture of disunity, violent competition and the romanticizing of the “gang-banging” mentality, which renders us incapable of redressing the conditions we found ourselves subjected to within these razor-wire plantations.
There is no silver bullet or magic wand that can be used to magically expedite the transformation that must be made: Transforming the criminal mentality into a revolutionary mentality is a protracted process that demands accountability and rigorous educating.
I am dedicated to assisting with this transformation any way that I can. One way is to shed some light on the draconian policies and procedures that governs those of us who have been labeled “gang-members”, labels known as Security Risk Group (SRG) or Security Threat Groups (STG), so we can begin to seek redress for these policies & procedures.
Gang Validation Process
Prisoners who have been labeled as “gang members” often suffer significant unfair prejudice. Due to the officers who are responsible for the validation process opinions being often based on sweeping generalizations and stereotypes about “gang members” generally, unreliable methodology, and/or the officer’s racial bias.
Here in North Carolina, the Department of Adult Corrections (DAC) has “certified” twenty-one alleged prison gangs as Security Risk Groups (SRG). Prisoners are validated as SRG members by Prison Intelligence Officers (PIO) who are white, whose discretion reigns supreme in determining who is validated as a SRG member. These subjective decisions lead to disproportionate validation of prisoners of color, particularly Black prisoners.
A stark example of the racially uneven application of SRG validations is evident in the percentage of white prisoners who have been validated compared to Black prisoners. White prisoners make up 2% of the prisoners validated in NC prisoners.
Around the world, gangs are studied by those with specialized training in areas such as ethnography, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. In these fields, researchers are often subject to ethical standards that warn against manipulating data to advance their personal objectives and required to employ social science field research best practices in relation to data collection, analysis, and interpretation. The officers responsible for validating prisoners are not held to any such ethical standards and lack the foundational knowledge to determine if a prisoner is actually a SRG member or not.
The qualification, the degree, of specialized knowledge for these officers to be qualified as “gang experts” is particularly lacking. An officer can be qualified as a “gang expert” after having only a couple months on the job, as long as they have some formalized training. You would think these “gang officers” would be required to demonstrate a basic understanding of the complicated dynamics at issue where gang membership and behavior are concerned beyond stereotypes and prototypes. Being that these validations subject prisoners to indefinite sanctions and restrictions that not only impedes rehabilitation but affects the validated prisoners’ family as well.
These “gang officers” employ a worksheet which lists seventeen criteria for determining gang involvement, each of which is assigned a point value. Prisoners may be labeled as “suspects/associates” or “members”.
A qualifying score is not difficult to achieve: Prisoners bearing tattoos “thought” to signify gang affiliation and who socialize with “confirmed” gang members may be regarded as members themselves.
False positives are likely to arise under these criteria because, while they may indicate a correlation with gang membership, they do not establish causation. Because gang membership cannot be reliably inferred from the factors aforementioned these “gang officers” should not be allowed to opine about gang membership based on these factors.
Completed validation worksheets are forwarded to the DAC’s chief of special operations, Daryll Vann, who reviews the worksheets, confirms that “relevant” documentation is attached, and validates the identification. Prisoners who wish to contest the validation are not afforded the opportunity to do so. Prisoners receive no notice of their validation, no procedural due process, nor a periodic review that would enable the prisoner to have the validation removed. Therefore, prisoners who have been validated remain validated for the duration of their incarceration and irrevocably subject to SRG policy deprivations.
There are only two ways to have the SRG validation removed. There is a SRG program that’s provided to a limited number of prisoners. It is a 9-month program at Foothills Correctional, a prison located in the rural mountains region of Western North Carolina. The staff employed there are exclusively white who live in race-segregated communities who are out of touch with the cultures of the prisoners they oversee. When these “gang officers” walk through the doors of the prison, many of them, knowingly or unknowingly, hold negative biases toward those who have been validated and those of color.
The media perpetuates inaccurate narratives of violence, criminality, and dishonesty among racial minorities that many of these “gang officers” unknowingly internalize. It shows in how they interact and deal with the prisoners.
The DAC describes this program as being a program that “targets those beliefs (cognitions) that support criminal behavior…” and seeks to shift the thinking that supports these beliefs. Prisoners who complete this program must undergo a debriefing and renounce their affiliation, if any, before the validation is removed. This program is not available to prisoners who have been labeled problematic. The other way to have the validation removed is to complete your prison sentence and be discharged from DAC custody. Of the 1343 prisoners released from DAC’s custody last year, at least 572 were alleged SRG members.
Draconian Gang Policies & Procedures
The ostensible purpose of the DAC SRG policies and procedures is to avoid prison disturbances supposedly fomented by gangs. It is nonetheless clear that these policies and procedures has the effect of incapacitating significant numbers of prisoners and has cultivated an environment opposite from what prisoner officials claim to be “safer”.
Those who have been validated find themselves subjected to draconian sanctions and restrictions. Validated prisoners are prohibited from receiving visits from anyone beyond immediate family. This excludes aunts, uncles, cousins and the mother of your child(ren); if you have no immediate family member to accompany your child to visitation, you are unable to visit with them. Our children’s interests are not, as a matter of right, factored into SRG validation determinations. The fact that parent-child visitation can help children overcome the challenges of parental separation and reduce recidivism rates is well-documented. But yet, prison officials find it plausible to implement such a policy that prevents parent-child visits.
As with the prisoners who have been validated, Black and Hispanic children are the ones greatly affected by this policy. DAC has imposed this policy without any cognizance that such a restriction might implicate the parent-child relationship, which is typically subject to extraordinary protection by the courts. But yet this policy goes unchecked.
Throughout the duration of my incarceration I’ve been unable to visit with my daughter, because I have no immediate family to accompany her; this has prevented she and I from developing a meaningful relationship. This is something that majority of us are experiencing.
Moreover, this policy has an outsized impact on Black families and other members of marginalized communities who bear the brunt of mass incarceration. Limiting a prisoner’s visitors to immediate family only effectively cuts a prisoner off from family members who may have raised him. As we know in marginalized communities, there are an overwhelming amount of fractured families. Grandparents and others play the mother-father role.
Then there are the prisoners who were raised in foster care, who have never been blessed with the opportunity to meet their immediate family. There are no exceptions for foster care parents.
Although these restrictions are sometimes justified, they are being used indiscriminately without individual analysis.
On February 19, 2019, a policy was implemented that prohibited validated prisoners from receiving financial support from anyone who wasn’t an approved visitor. Prison officials claim that this was done to curtail “black market” activities and strongarming. It’s not difficult to see how such a policy would increase these activities, moreover create an environment where those who do have means of receiving financial support become targets of strongarming and other acts of violence.
This policy was implemented 8 months before now retired director of prisons, Kenneth Lassiter, requested more funding for security and control weapons. During the 8 months to when he requested this additional funding, violence amongst prisoners drastically increased. I know because majority of these close-custody facilities were placed on lockdown due to the increase of violence.
Prisoners who are validated have no access to any educational or vocational programming, forced to serve idle prison sentences. They are locked in their cells virtually all of the time and otherwise maintained in extremely harsh conditions. Unable to have their custody level reduced to medium or minimum security and job opportunities are non-existent. Common sense would tell prison officials that there are abundant reasons to believe that these policies and restrictions will produce unfortunate results both inside and outside of prison.
The Ramifications of these Policies
Motivated by an inaccurate perception of gangs and how they operate, the DAC has adopted policies that have enhanced group cohesiveness and the identities of gang-affiliated prisoners. These policies have promoted new gang connections for prisoners who, due to the difficulties inherent in gang identification, inadequate procedures and racial stereotyping, are misidentified. The validated prisoner tells himself “they think I’m a gang member = I might as well be one”.
Of course these policies raise obvious moral and ethical questions. However, I would like to focus on how these policies make no sense from a correctional perspective. Even if these “gang officers” are creating or enhancing gang identities, why does it matter? Validated prisoners maintained in these locked down blocks, after all, are effectively disabled from committing acts of misconduct when locked in their cells.
Validated prisoners are denied access to visitation, financial support, transfers to medium or minimum custody, as well as parole. They have nothing more to lose so they are not deterred by any threat of punishment, what else can be taken from them? They have no incentive to refrain from gang involvement.
Aside from prison concerns, the impact of these policy’s ramifications will be felt most profoundly on the streets and communities to which these prisoners will return. As I pointed out, 571 of the 1343 prisoners released from NC prisons last year, were alleged gang members. In general, ninety-six percent of all prisoners return to society. To my knowledge, there are recidivism studies focusing or gang affiliated prison releases, there is evidence that gang members may retain their gang identify upon release (see: eg CAMP & CAMP, supra note 70, at viii, ix; Salvador Buentello eta l, Prison Gang Development: A Theoretical Model, Prison J., Fall-Winter 1991, at 3, 8.). Thus these policies not only fail to enhance prison security, it also undermines public safety.
We Have A Responsibility
Prisoners nationwide find themselves subject to similar sanctions and restrictions under the guise of enhancing prison security. I’ve revealed how these policies target prisoners of color and how they affect not only us but our families and communities as well. We have the numbers, we have the capability and we have the know how to bring about change. But as Komrade George Jackson expressed; “We all seem to be in the grip of some terrible quandary. Our enemies have so confused us that we seem to have been rendered incapable of the smallest responsibility. I see this same irresponsibility in every exchange with my kinsmen here, irresponsibility, or mediocrity at best disloyalty, self-hatred, cowardice, competition between themselves, resentment of any who may have excelled in anything…”
Because of the inexorable nature of any overseas, nationwide demonstrations on the outside and within these walls is presently necessary if we are to connect the connectors. Prison Lives Matter has made it possible for us to address such conditions because PLM has formed a united front for political prisoners, prisoners of war, politicized individuals behind the walls of these razor-wire plantations and their organizations, as well as any outside formations in union with the struggles of prisoners. It’s on us to initiate the process, it’s on us to network with one another to get on the same page, so we can write a page in the history books!
Dare to Struggle
Dare to Win
Joseph “Shine White” Stewart
Joseph Stewart #0802041, Granville Correctional, PO Box 247, Phoenix, MD, 21311
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